Years ago I watched Lonely Are The Brave, the film of the novel Brave Cowboy written by the anarchist environmentalist and wilderness enthusiast Edward Abbey. When the Kirk Douglas main character shot down a police helicopter the audience loved it. Why? Because we identified with a man trying to stop the legal authorities imposing injustice.

(If you saw the film but don’t identify with the Six, some of whom allegedly tried to do the same, ask yourself why not. Hint: Kirk is white; now look at the back of your hand.)

Business schmisiness. Goods are manufactured and sold so that the employing class can appropriate the profits generated in the production process by the labour of the working class. Retailing is the final part of this process. Retailers are members of or at least the willing accomplices of the employing class in this worldwide act of grand larceny. The riots were communal attempts to reverse the process; as far as they went, they succeeded until the cops intervened, as ever on the side of the real robbers.

Just think of the billions in profits extracted from the workers of the world every hour of the day, every day of the year, over the centuries the wage system has been in existence, and the resulting massive inequalities of wealth, of health, of quality of life that grow bigger by the day. The only thing that is surprising is how few working people feel cheated and dispossessed enough to be willing to get together and take matters into their own hands to get back what has been stolen from them and their kind, or to directly challenge the exclusive right of the state to use violence to maintain a status quo that year in year out damages and shortens the lives of billions.

And once you’re on the side, even in just an ignorant, half-arsed way, of those who take the path towards defiance and restitution, it is hard to think of a sound or a sight more provocative, or more emblematic of the dominance of an unjust economic system, than the clattering spy in the sky overhead